Need for Speed relies on the always-on principle, which means in order to play you have to be connected to the internet. This has many advantages, but also disadvantages because you depend on the availability of the servers and your internet connection. Executive Producer Marcus Nilsson explains in the Official Xbox Magazine why they want to use always-on:

"We’ve been pretty big with Autolog throughout the years and, as we know, it’s a really powerful feature," says Nilsson. "This time around we’re going to give it more of a human voice. It will treat your friend’s play as if it is part of the narrative experience."

Additionally the game features a new image sharing system:

We also have a new snapshot system as well," adds Nilsson. "Which is taking pictures of a lot of different moments – [they go] out to the Need for Speed network where people can ‘like’ them, and those likes are being pushed back into the game as currency. So you get progression from sharing your photos.

The upcoming Need for Speed will feature 5 Icons the player will encounter in the game. Those Icons are (in their genre) famous drivers and tuners, eacah representing different areas:

Outlaw-Icon
Become an Outlaw, messing with and escaping from the cops. Always looking to raise the stakes through risk vs reward driving, pushing the limits and looking over your shoulder. Live life on the edge as you crave the thrill of the chase.

Morohoshi-san is usually found prowling Tokyo’s expressways late at night in any one of his heavily modified and brightly coloured Lamborghinis, little is known about the real Shinichi Morohoshi, a man with one foot in normal society and one in the underworld. Morohoshi-san is a walking contradiction, an oxymoron caught between his love of the fastest, the loudest and the flashiest street cars in existence and a desire to keep who and what he is, to himself.

Style-Icon
Style is pure expression through driving, sending your car into a corner sideways with ultimate precision. It’s the feeling of freedom for that split second as your tires leave the ground, when you find yourself in a place where only you and the car exist. For some, style is all that matters.

Ken Block might just be the undisputed king of the internet and has quickly become one of the most recognisable faces and names in the automotive game. Years of driving in top-tier rally, X-Games competitions and his famous Gymkhana videos watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world have honed his skills behind the wheel. Few, if any, can match his ability to throw a flame-belching car sideways with such incredible precision.

In a realm where an inch can mean the difference between worldwide fame or global ridicule, Block rules the streets.

Build Icon
Build is where you take your car to the extreme through both visual and performance modification. The constant need to improve and personalize, shaping the car to your own vision. Craftsmen build, searching for perfection.
Nakai-san

Akira Nakai is a true automotive artist, an artisan builder who uses feel, emotion and nuance to build some of the world’s wildest Porsches. Based out of a small shop in the back blocks of rural Chiba, near Tokyo, Nakai-san has taken his long-running Rauh Welt Begriff brand of Porsche tuning to the world, and now spends much of his time travelling across the globe, building super-aggressive cars for an almost cult-like following of customers.

Speed Icon
Speed is the connection that exists between car and driver that is only present at top speeds. It’s about keeping your nerve and never lifting off the gas. It’s about the adrenaline rush of taking a corner at high speed, having faith that your car will hold firm and not lose grip. The fearless always push the limits.
Magnus Walker

Magnus Walker is one of the most recognisable characters in the automotive world, not just for the dreadlocks and majestic beard, but the accompanying roar of a turbocharged flat-six cylinder howling through the open exhausts of a Porsche “Widowmaker” 930 Turbo.

Magnus may collect and modify classic Porsches, but he’s never been afraid to get out and push them as far as he can on the mean city streets and canyon roads of Los Angeles.

Crew-Ikone
Ride together with your Crew and never hit the streets alone. Put your faith in others as bumpers come within inches of one another. This is the skill of close proximity chaos.

The name Risky Devil has been synonymous with the underground street drifting scene in Chicago. Fish, AJ, Cook, Stevo and T2 are drivers of some of the most badass, tyre-incinerating and envy-inducing street sliders found anywhere, this crew has long been running the midnight streets in this part of the world.

Always coating their machines in a violent shade of blood red, Risky Devil has constantly pushed the boundaries to the absolute limit in search of perfect form, both when it comes to driving and their VIP-inspired, spark-throwing style.

Technically they put a lot of effort in the production and the sequences during the game are created with realtime compositing, where real persons are planted in the game, or the other way round you can find your own car in movie scenes, which creates an interesting graphical mixture:

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